You can't make assumptions about food anymore. What seems healthy may not be. Such is the case with cupcakes and muffins. As dietitian Tamara Duker Freuman points out, often times you're better off choosing a cupcake over a muffin for breakfast:

In our topsy-turvy world, however, it's possible-and even likely-that your garden-variety, store-bought muffin has more calories than your standard cupcake. That is correct: in many cases, you are likely to be better off eating a cupcake for breakfast than a muffin. Not that I am endorsing either choice, mind you. Your "average" muffin from, say, a leading chain of café-bakeries, is 5.5 ounces and has 511 calories; its average cupcake is 3 ounces and 356 calories.

By that measurement, the cupcake offers more calories per ounce but less overall. You also may get other health benefits out of the calories of the muffin, but likely none that outweigh the extremely high amount of calories for such a small item. That said, the takeaway here shouldn't be to eat cupcakes for breakfast if you're a muffin lover. This strange reality is indicative of a larger problem, that Freuman elaborates on in her article: you can't assume anything about the food that you buy anymore. What may seem healthy, or at least healthier, could be a bad choice for your body. Although most of us know to consult the nutrition facts before we buy and to cook more than we eat out if we want to eat well, we still manage to make assumptions from time to time when we're in a hurry or our minds are elsewhere. That doesn't really work these days. If something looks unhealthy, you can probably assume it is. If something seems like a healthy choice, however, you ought to check it out first.